Anthony Romero’s made the argument in yesterday’s NYT:
The spectacle of the president’s granting pardons to torturers still makes my stomach turn. But doing so may be the only way to ensure that the American government never tortures again. Pardons would make clear that crimes were committed; that the individuals who authorized and committed torture were indeed criminals; and that future architects and perpetrators of torture should beware. Prosecutions would be preferable, but pardons may be the only viable and lasting way to close the Pandora’s box of torture once and for all.
Eric Posner rejects this rationale:
The logic is faulty; interrogators who use torture in the future will expect to be pardoned just like their predecessors.
Whether you call non-prosecution a “pardon” or not, it amounts to the same thing. But what is most odd is that a civil libertarian believes that the president should tar people as criminals without giving them the benefit of a trial. Romero, like the supporters of torture, do what people always do when Congress or the courts can’t, or won’t, do what they want. They turn to the president and demand executive action.
Jonathan Bernstein, on the other hand, advocates for pardons:
This step is critical to keep the issue from becoming partisan, with Democrats being against torture and Republicans allowing it. If torture is to remain banned, it’s going to take reviving the consensus of the elite against it that was broken in the Bush administration. Pardons take care of the legal jeopardy part for the officials; generous pardons might lessen their reputations as bad guys.
A final step has to be a truth and reconciliation commission to detail what happened and how counterproductive it was.
Julia Azari puts such pardons in historical context:
Like Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the act of pardoning would also acknowledge the wrongdoing, even while closing off the possibility of punishment. At the same time, it would depart from the logic that has informed many other politically visible pardons: while breaking from the past, it would acknowledge his opponent’s – not his own party’s – legitimate role in the polity despite serious transgressions. In the current political climate, that might actually be a radical move.
My core problem with this is that a pardon should only be given if the recipient has expressed remorse. Not only have Bush and Cheney and Tenet and Rumsfeld and Hayden expressed no remorse, they have aggressively defended their record, embraced the value of torture, lied about its effectiveness and refused even to acknowledge its appalling amateurism, gross miscarriages of justice and even deaths. There is no way such unrepentant war criminals can be pardoned against their will.
We have a rogue party in this country – a rogue party unlike any other in the West. There isn’t a single political party in the Western world that supports torture, except the GOP. There has never been a political party in American history that has openly supported torture. You cannot and must not appease this tendency. It is a deep threat to our democracy and to our way of life. By allowing the executive branch to do anything it wants, outside of any reasonable interpretation of the law, beyond any moral concerns, and to contract out torture sessions to amateurs is so egregious attack on the rule of law and the West that it cannot be tolerated, let alone pardoned.
Obama’s record in all this is a disgrace – a moral, political act of sustained cowardice and co-optation. It would be compounded by any attempt to formally pardon the guilty for crimes for which there is no statute of limitations and which place the US outside the norms of civilization. It would, moreover, destroy what’s left of the Geneva Conventions, turning their imperative for prosecuting war criminals into an actual pardoning of them. I’m ashamed of living in a country where this is even considered as an option.
The Dish 